Catalog distributor Newark Electronics, which has been making significant improvements in its e-procurement processes and e-commerce tools during the past 18 months, will describe its latest effort to speed up the RFQ process at next week's Electronic Distribution Show in Las Vegas. After a year of development on the software, Newark says it has successfully automated its quoting system, dubbed The Scrubber, to turn around RFQs within 48 hours, compared with the industry standard of two weeks.

Why is that important? According to the findings of a Newark-sponsored market research study on turnaround times for everything from a stockroom item to a large bill of materials (BOM), distributors are doing a poor job. On average, about half the distributors surveyed will not get back to a customer that has submitted a large BOM. For distributors that do answer, the average response time is roughly two weeks. What's more discouraging is that distributors, on average, are matching only about 10 percent of the items on the BOM.

Newark says the proprietary Scrubber system has, at least so far, turned around 100 percent of its RFQs within 48 hours, and often within 24 hours or less, because branch salespeople can use the system right on their desktops. The match rate against Newark's database of more than 1 million products is about 40 percent.

Unfortunately, the folks responsible for purchasing still have to scramble to locate the other 60 percent of the BOM. But it's still better than a 10 percent hit rate. Newark's goal is to improve the match rate to about 50 percent on average.

Design engineers who are running stock rooms and juggling a bunch of parts numbers wind up chasing all around the catalog or electronic world to try to find them, said Newark. Newark's systems use software algorithms that scrub out the OEM part number, which improves the match rate.

Customers get a quote that includes details such as descriptions, substitute parts, pricing and inventory availability. Not only is it free, but it also frees up design engineers to focus on things other than purchasing.